Since we'd reached late enough in the year, I took the time to move the 2-foot mana crystals down to the growth lab using the new mana-insulative containers that utilized fluorite. After forty days, I'd grown one of the 2-foot crystals all the way up to 5-feet and got it moved back into the tunnel. It ended up increasing the available mana in the tunnel by quite a bit, which should end up making exploratory mining more effective. The tunnel where we'd found the mana crystals should be breaching the surface any day now, so I'd expect the next tunnel's progress will benefit even more from this larger central crystal, and it's influence on the recharging rate of smaller crystal trays.

After that 5-foot crystal was moved, Tiberius was finally free to begin doing research on his idea of encasing mana crystals in a fluorite crystal shell. Every so often, I come back to work on a project with Tiberius, and I remember just how hairbrained and reckless he can be. The first thing, and I do mean the very first thing, that he did when I gave him the go ahead was reveal that he'd already encased a natural crystal that was a few inches in size in two halves of cut heat fluorite a few inches thick which he was holding on the end of a large stone stick. Before I could react, he proceeded to run up the stairs and out of the lab.

Well, he didn't make it to the surface before it was clear that the central crystal broke. Honestly, if it hadn't broken I would have been impressed. Perhaps more shockingly, he proceeded to pull out some charcoal and make a big mark on the wall, and began walking back down the stairs. He made a big show of catching his breath and not responding to me chastising him for wasting that crystal. I was about done giving him a lecture on wasting precious resources when he revealed an even bigger heat fluorite crystal, which he assured me had a mana crystal of similar size in the center.

This time, however, I was positioned right in the middle of the stairs, and wouldn't let him run past me. I'd at least grasped what he was attempting to do. He was clearly just trying to run them up to the surface to see how far he could get before they broke. To which I then discussed that if he wants better data, he should walk them up slowly, rather than sprinting as far as he can, since he'll never run at the exact same pace twice.

He protested that the only reason he was planning on running past me to begin with was because he knew I wouldn't approve of him wasting the precious mana crystals, but it's at least let him collect some data on the whole situation. Ultimately, it just boiled down to I didn't want them wasted on bad data, and if he did it accurately, collected good data, and got my approval, I'm also interested in the results, so I'm ok with some of the mana crystals being destroyed.

As for his choice of heat fluorite over something more measurable like lead fluorite, he figured it'd be the easiest to run with and still notice the effect it had while he ran. Which I admitted was probably true. He would have at least been able to measure some amount of qualitative data. Moving forward though, he'll be going slowly, one step at a time, using lead fluorite instead of the iron doped heat fluorite. That way, we can quantitatively measure the extra weight, and compare that against lead fluorite without a mana crystal in the middle at various depths.

If his results are interesting enough, I might have to convince Zeb to give me a few more stoneshaping demons to process the mana crystal material. For the time being, however, it's not looking like Zeb is going to be getting his hands on a large crystal. Instead, I'm going to spend a few weeks making some nearly identical mana crystal samples to be used in Tiberius's research. It's actually not a complete loss when the mana crystals end up breaking apart, as we can at least recover a fairly large percentage of the solid material, meaning we only need to resupply the necessary argon to grow the crystals again.

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After another 20 days of growing mana crystals while Tiberius ran about breaking them, it was time to test out a larger barge's effectiveness in dealing with leviathans. This barge was larger than the last one, to allow it to handle the extra 20 tons of dynamite we loaded into it. Thankfully, the weather held and we were able to launch the barge without a hitch. Elora didn't come this time to observe. In the time since the last launch, we actually installed a few new artillery pieces here. While I don't think it'll be useful for actually killing a crab, it might at least convince an injured one to go find somewhere else to rest, which would potentially make it easier for a different leviathan to finish it off.

Unlike last time, there wasn't a fast conclusion to the situation. The barge made it much further out over the course of a few hours before anything happened to it. Either the crab had moved on from being in front of the bay, or it'd realized that barges are dangerous. In either case, we actually got to witness what we'd been hoping for. This time, an eel leviathan was the one to attack. Almost like a snake, it opened it's whole mouth to swallow the barge whole. For a moment, I was worried. The barge was swallowed whole without detonating.

That only lasted a few seconds, however, before we saw a massive explosion completely tear the head of the eel leviathan from the rest of it's body. A few seconds later we heard an incredibly loud blast as the sound finally reached us. The sound of the blast was startling enough that two of the eagles took flight temporarily, circled around for a bit, then returned to their nesting sites.

It was good to see that we could actually kill a leviathan with our explosives. It'll take a bit of time before we can ramp up production enough to properly deal with the problem, but ever time we kill one, it makes the sea that much safer for us moving forward. Getting rid of the leviathans should also reduce the amount of predation that the very large fishes experience, potentially allowing us to have a higher overall fishing yield as the ecosystem adjusts.

Though, it wasn't just a dead leviathan that was leftover from the blast. Thousands of fishes floated to the surface after the blast, so it's probably for the best that we're having to wait months at a time to send one of these barges out. I expect that when we send out another barge, there is a good chance that many individuals who are from the mainland, including Elora, will want to come watch. We still don't know how successful each barge will be, but if we're at least able to kill leviathans with relative safety, that's a major milestone. Based on the rate that our nitroglycerin lines are being built, I expect the next barge will probably launch in a bit over three months from now.

We had been stockpiling a lot of paper over time, but we actually are going to need to build another paper mill to produce the amount we're going to need moving forward for stabilizing the dynamite. Unlike the mechanical wood pulp we made before, we're actually incredibly close from being able to make high-quality chemically pulped paper. In fact, we're currently producing some of it and just leaving it mixed into our impure sodium hydroxide solution.

When we've been electrolyzing salt water to make sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid, some amount of the process actually produces sodium chlorate in the liquid solution, rather than being released as chlorine gas. Because of the way we've laid out our electrolysis, we've minimized the amount that gets produced, but it shouldn't take too long to re-adjust the layout of the electrolytic cells to instead produce an excess of it. The only main ingredient we'd really be missing after that would be methanol. Thankfully, we do have both zinc and copper that we can use to make the necessary catalyst to allow us to mass produce the stuff.

After that, the process of chemically pulping the wood is actually fairly straightforward, and we should be able to really mass produce it. In fact, I'm somewhat worried about the forests on the island as a part of this process. The process I have in mind for methanol production is going to also require wood, and we'll probably use charcoal to reduce sodium sulfide to sodium sulfate in the process, adding a small amount more that we'll need. While the amount we actually use over time is relatively low, it still takes decades for our trees to regrow. If it's only paper for our own use, then we should be fine, but if we ever want to open up high quality paper trade in bulk, we'd almost need to build a factory on the mainland just to have access to excess trees to do so.

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